Category: Health & Medicine

ST. LOUIS — The large crowds of people at the Lake of the Ozarks over Memorial Day weekend have not led to any more reported cases of COVID-19, Missouri’s top health official health department said Wednesday.

“The answer, to our knowledge, is no,” Dr. Randall Williams, director of the Department of Health and Senior Services, said when asked whether more cases have come from the gatherings, photos of which showed throngs of people close together without wearing masks.

Williams answered questions during a daily news briefing in Jefferson City hosted by Missouri Gov. Mike Parson to address civil unrest and efforts to contain the coronavirus.

Pictures and videos of the lake crowds had prompted concern among the public and health officials.

One person, a Boone County resident, tested positive last week and likely was infectious while among the crowds. That is according to the Camden County Health Department, which has jurisdiction over much of the Lake of the Ozarks region……….

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (KRQE) –Did Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham play by her own rules during the public health order? KRQE News 13 has learned in April, when she ordered non-essential businesses to shut down and lectured all New Mexicans to stay home, a non-essential business opened up so she could buy jewelry and have it delivered to her.

In early April, Gov. Lujan Grisham stressed that New Mexicans needed to stay home and should only go out for essential items such as food. She also announced that all non-essential businesses were closed. “We are in really tough financial times as a state. It mirrors the incredible, personal sacrifices that happen every single day because people have limited their ability to work, telecommuting and many people, in fact, have lost their jobs,” said Gov. Lujan Grisham on April 3rd.

However, just days after the April 3rd news conference and a week before Easter, KRQE News 13 has learned that Gov. Lujan Grisham called an employee at Lilly Barrack on Paseo to buy expensive jewelry. The jewelry was bought over the phone, but the employee went to the store, got the jewelry and placed it outside the door of the store where someone who knew the governor picked it up. This is according to the person who runs Lilly Barrack stores. She says she didn’t know about it until after it happened. She also said no one was allowed in the stores at that time due to the public health order.

The governor refused an on-camera interview but has a different version of the story. In an email from a governor spokesman, he says that “Lujan Grisham did call an employee, saying they had a longstanding personal relationship. The employee came here [Lilly Barrack], got the jewelry and took it home, left it outside their home and then someone came and picked it up.”

The governor’s office first said it was a campaign staffer, then later told KRQE it was the governor’s friend, but wouldn’t release a name. They also said the transaction was entirely contact-less, remote and permissible.

The spokesman also pointed to the governor’s order at the time stating “none of the state’s public health orders have restricted the conduct of business operations in which an employee only interacts with clients or customers remotely.” However, that same order also states it requires the closure of physical retails spaces and doesn’t mention anything about home delivery.

In a time of non-essential closures where curbside was not allowed, KRQE asked if home delivery was okay. The governor’s spokesman said it was not a home delivery and businesses were encouraged to find creative ways to conduct business safely. He also added the store was not opened for the governor and stated that “turning the key inside a door to ‘open’ a store wouldn’t violate the order…” He also said non-essential businesses all across the state let employees in to do inventory or clean.

Other businesses like Mark Diamond’s Jewelers did not interpret the orders the way the governor’s office did. A manager at Gertrude Zachary says no one was allowed in their store and they wouldn’t even risk it because of a fear of fines. They thought online sales through shipping was their only option, but they got zero customers and lost hundreds of thousands in sales.

KRQE News 13 asked about the two people who left their homes to get jewelry to the governor. Her office says this was an unusual transaction and while “of course the governor has been telling people to stay home to the greatest extent possible, it also true she’s been urging New Mexicans to find ways to support local businesses.”

So could you have called up a store and received this kind of service during the pandemic? The governor’s office says if a New Mexican has that kind of personal relationship with a local business and local businesses are trying to operate creatively to keep themselves and their employees afloat while staying safe, certainly this kind of transaction could have occurred.

KRQE News 13 also talked to the manager of Ooh Ahh Jewelry in Nob Hill. She said they did online sales only with one person in the shop who shipped orders out and didn’t do home or curbside deliveries because it wasn’t part of the April public health orders.
Curbside delivery wasn’t allowed until May 1.

Most people are more likely to wind up six feet under because of almost anything else under the sun other than COVID-19.

The CDC just came out with a report that should be earth-shattering to the narrative of the political class, yet it will go into the thick pile of vital data and information about the virus that is not getting out to the public. For the first time, the CDC has attempted to offer a real estimate of the overall death rate for COVID-19, and under its most likely scenario, the number is 0.26%. Officials estimate a 0.4% fatality rate among those who are symptomatic and project a 35% rate of asymptomatic cases among those infected, which drops the overall infection fatality rate (IFR) to just 0.26% — almost exactly where Stanford researchers pegged it a month ago.

Until now, we have been ridiculed for thinking the death rate was that low, as opposed to the 3.4% estimate of the World Health Organization, which helped drive the panic and the lockdowns. Now the CDC is agreeing to the lower rate in plain ink.

Plus, ultimately we might find out that the IFR is even lower because numerous studies and hard counts of confined populations have shown a much higher percentage of asymptomatic cases. Simply adjusting for a 50% asymptomatic rate would drop their fatality rate to 0.2% — exactly the rate of fatality Dr. John Ionnidis of Stanford University projected.

More importantly, as I mentioned before, the overall death rate is meaningless because the numbers are so lopsided. Given that at least half of the deaths were in nursing homes, a back-of-the-envelope estimate would show that the infection fatality rate for non-nursing home residents would only be 0.1% or 1 in 1,000. And that includes people of all ages and all health statuses outside of nursing homes. Since nearly all of the deaths are those with comorbidities.

The CDC estimates the death rate from COVID-19 for those under 50 is 1 in 5,000 for those with symptoms, which would be 1 in 6,725 overall, but again, almost all those who die have specific comorbidities or underlying conditions. Those without them are more likely to die in a car accident. And schoolchildren, whose lives, mental health, and education we are destroying, are more likely to get struck by lightning…

Officials in Washington have admitted that gunshot victims are included in the coronavirus death count.

The state’s Department of Health reported about 100 cases of people with the coronavirus or “probable” cases of the COVID-19 virus who died and were included in the total tally of deaths attributed to the pandemic, but officials can’t trace how the patient contracted the virus.

“So our method that we use to give up to date counts related to COVID death is not our usual process for how we track data for deaths in Washington,” Dr. Katie Hutchison, health statistics manager for the Department of Health, said. “We had to modify what we normally do in order to quickly meet the data and informational needs of the pandemic. We’re aware that there is some confusion about how this works and whether or not this modified process is accurate.”

681 (82%) “list some variation of ‘COVID-19’ in one of the causes of death” on the death certificate.

41 (5%) of the death certificates do not list COVID-19 as a cause of death but indicate it was a “significant condition contributing to death.”

106 (13%) deaths involved people who had previously tested positive for COVID-19 but did not have the virus listed as a cause or contributing factor to their death on their death certificate.

“Our dashboard numbers do include any death to a person that has tested positive to COVID-9,” Hutchison said.

Local outlets in the area have reported the numbers then include people who tested positive for the virus but died from other causes, such as gunshot wounds.

“We currently do have some deaths that are being reported that are clearly from other causes,” Hutchison added. “We have about five deaths, less than five deaths, that we know of that are related to obvious other causes. In this case, they are from gunshot wounds.”

According to the Freedom Foundation, the state’s Department of Health said, “Ultimately … we suspect that we are actually more likely to be under-counting deaths than over-counting them. … It may take up to a year or more to get final counts on COVID-19 deaths.”

Democratic Gov. Jay Inslee has called the findings “dangerous,” “disgusting,” and “malarkey.”

Background: An ongoing outbreak of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has spread around the world. It is debatable whether asymptomatic COVID-19 virus carriers are contagious. We report here a case of the asymptomatic patient and present clinical characteristics of 455 contacts, which aims to study the infectivity of asymptomatic carriers.

Material and methods: 455 contacts who were exposed to the asymptomatic COVID-19 virus carrier became the subjects of our research. They were divided into three groups: 35 patients, 196 family members and 224 hospital staffs. We extracted their epidemiological information, clinical records, auxiliary examination results and therapeutic schedules.

Results: The median contact time for patients was four days and that for family members was five days. Cardiovascular disease accounted for 25% among original diseases of patients. Apart from hospital staffs, both patients and family members were isolated medically. During the quarantine, seven patients plus one family member appeared new respiratory symptoms, where fever was the most common one. The blood counts in most contacts were within a normal range. All CT images showed no sign of COVID-19 infection. No severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infections was detected in 455 contacts by nucleic acid test.

Conclusion: In summary, all the 455 contacts were excluded from SARS-CoV-2 infection and we conclude that the infectivity of some asymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 carriers might be weak.

On Friday, Michigan Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer extended her state’s stay-at-home order through July 12. The order was set to expire on May 28. The governor is facing mounting criticism for some of her coronavirus-related restrictions, among the strictest in the nation.

“I find it reasonable and necessary to extend Executive Orders 2020-62, 2020-69, and 2020-96 for three weeks from the date of this order,” Whitmer stated in her executive order.

Earlier this week, the governor did allow social gatherings of 10 people or fewer to resume and retail stores to arrange appointment-only shopping for customers. But things like gyms, hair salons and barbershops remain closed.

Despite a decline in coronavirus cases in her state, Gov. Whitmer says Michigan is “not out of the woods yet.”

“If we’re going to lower the chance of a second wave and continue to protect our neighbors and loved ones from the spread of this virus, we must continue to do our part by staying safer at home,” the governor said in a statement first reported by the Detroit Free Press.

Gov. Whitmer is accused of using her coronavirus response to boost her national profile as she competes for a spot on the ticket with presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden. But many in her state find the governor’s restrictions baffling, and the governor has faced protests and criticism over her handling of the outbreak.

Doctors in Northern California say they have seen more deaths from suicide than they’ve seen from the coronavirus during the pandemic.

“The numbers are unprecedented,” Dr. Michael deBoisblanc of John Muir Medical Center in Walnut Creek, California, told ABC 7 News about the increase of deaths by suicide, adding that he’s seen a “year’s worth of suicides” in the last four weeks alone.

DeBoisblanc said he believes it’s time for California officials to end the stay-at-home order and let people back out into their communities.

“Personally, I think it’s time,” he said. “I think, originally, this was put in place to flatten the curve and to make sure hospitals have the resources to take care of COVID patients. We have the current resources to do that, and our other community health is suffering.”

Kacey Hansen, a trauma center nurse at John Muir Medical Center for more than 30 years, says she’s worried not only about the increased suicide attempts but also about the hospital’s ability to save as many patients as usual.

“What I have seen recently, I have never seen before,” Hansen said. “I have never seen so much intentional injury.”

Businesses across California have started defying stay-at-home orders imposed by Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom, and hundreds of protesters have hit the streets, making the argument that the orders were only meant to flatten the curve of the virus’s spread, which Newsom himself said was achieved in mid-April.

Now into the third month of the coronavirus crisis, Americans are getting restless. Having for the most part accepted in March that fighting a pandemic with incomplete data required taking drastic steps, they now want the benefit of the lose-lose bargain that COVID-19 forced on them. We flattened the curve, the thinking goes, preventing our medical system from being overwhelmed—heck, health care workers are being laid off!—so now it’s time to resume our lives and recoup as much as we can.

The constitutional analysis of the various shutdown orders tracks that popular sentiment: States have the “police power” to govern for the general health, welfare and safety of society, so long as they have sufficient justification for doing so. But that doesn’t mean that there’s no limit on the actions that state and local officials can take, or that actions that were justified at one point will continue to be justified forever, regardless of underlying developments.

In other words, it’s prudent in a pandemic to restrict activities that would otherwise bring people together in a way that facilitates viral transmission, but it doesn’t mean governors get to “shut down” anything and everything on a whim. Recall that viral video of the guy running along the beach in California, chased by a hapless cop. Or that dad who got arrested for playing catch with his kids in a public park. Or mayoral edicts that stop drive-in church but permit drive-thru liquor sales. Or the Michigan order banning motorboats but not sailboats; the sale of seeds but not weed.

Baker County Circuit Judge Matthew Shirtcliff issued his opinion in response to a lawsuit filed earlier this month by 10 churches around Oregon that argued the state’s social-distancing directives were unconstitutional.

Brown said she would immediately seek an emergency review by the Oregon Supreme Court. Her attorneys asked the judge to stay his ruling until the high court could review the case, but he declined.

This is one reason the stakes are so high this November.
The Left really does think this way.

I erased the middle letters of the f-word. As someone commented at the post, it seems obvious that not only have the shutdowns been far more severe than they needed to be, even some on the Left are starting to understand that there is no medical justification for continuing them. But that means that Democrat politicians such as Governors Gavin Newsom and Gretchen Whitmer will no longer be able to rule by diktat and the power of the statists will lessen. That is unacceptable.

So the pivot: it does not matter that the shutdowns are not medically necessary. We find them politically desirable because we know never to let a crisis go to waste.

So let’s try this:

If a medically-informed response to a pandemic creates economic hardship so serious that the economic impacts are more deadly than the virus, you change your idea of what “medically-informed” really means when it kills more people than it saves, you Communist totalitarian murderer.

But we could tell that Dusti Sage, whoever she is, was really serious and very insightful because she used the f-word. That is reserved for only the highest levels of discussion among the self-anointed elite.

Update: When Dusti Sage speaks of the destruction of the economy, with permanent effects, everyone needs to understand that destruction of the existing economy is a longstanding goal of the Left. Covid is their excuse, not their reason. They do not need a reason, just an opportunity.

BELLMAWR, N.J. – A gym in southern New Jersey has reopened for business in defiance of a state order that shut down nonessential businesses to help stem the spread of the coronavirus.

People began gathering outside the Atilis Gym in Bellmawr several hours before it reopened at 8 a.m. Monday.

“We are and only were here for everybody’s safety today. We planned for the worst and hoped for the best, and it seems like that’s what we have out here today,” the officer said to the owners and surrounding crowd.

“Formally, you are all in violation of the executive order. On that note, have a good day. Everybody be safe,” the officer said before walking away as the crowd erupted in cheers.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. authorities are not yet seeing spikes in coronavirus cases in places that are reopening but it was still too early to determine such trends, health secretary Alex Azar said on Sunday.

“We are seeing that in places that are opening, we’re not seeing this spike in cases,” Azar said on CNN’s “State of the Union” program. “We still see spikes in some areas that are, in fact, closed.”

However, Azar said identifying and reporting new cases takes time. A critical part of reopening will be surveillance of flu-like symptoms in the population and other hospital admissions data, as well as testing of asymptomatic individuals, he said.

“It’s still early days,” Azar cautioned in an interview with CBS’ “Face the Nation.” He said data will take some time to come in from states that reopened early such as Georgia and Florida.

Nearly all 50 U.S. states have begun to allow some businesses to reopen and residents to move more freely, but only 14 states have met the federal government’s guidelines for lifting measures aimed at fighting the pandemic, according to a Reuters analysis.

If you believe “Hanlon’s Razor”, Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity, it’s just idiots in positions of power making stupid decisions. Lately, that doesn’t seem to fully explain current events.

This metaphor can also describe how society can harm itself when measures taken to control a disease do more harm than good. Perhaps the most forceful and controversial reaction to the coronavirus epidemic has been the lockdown, which believe it or not, did not exist in the American context as a bureaucratic concept before 2006. As Jeffrey Tucker writes in the American Institute for Economic Research:

So far as anyone can tell, the intellectual machinery that made this mess was invented 14 years ago, and not by epidemiologists but by computer-simulation modelers. It was adopted not by experienced doctors – they warned ferociously against it – but by politicians. …

Maybe you don’t remember that the avian flu of 2006 didn’t amount to much. It’s true, despite all the extreme warnings about its lethality, H5N1 didn’t turn into much at all. What it did do, however, was send the existing president, George W. Bush, to the library to read about the 1918 flu and its catastrophic results. He asked for some experts to submit some plans to him about what to do when the real thing comes along.

Tucker lets the New York Times take up the story of how lockdown was born.

Fourteen years ago, two federal government doctors, Richard Hatchett and Carter Mecher, met with a colleague at a burger joint in suburban Washington for a final review of a proposal they knew would be treated like a piñata: telling Americans to stay home from work and school the next time the country was hit by a deadly pandemic.

When they presented their plan not long after, it was met with skepticism and a degree of ridicule by senior officials, who like others in the United States had grown accustomed to relying on the pharmaceutical industry, with its ever-growing array of new treatments, to confront evolving health challenges.

Drs. Hatchett and Mecher were proposing instead that Americans in some places might have to turn back to an approach, self-isolation, first widely employed in the Middle Ages.

How that idea — born out of a request by President George W. Bush to ensure the nation was better prepared for the next contagious disease outbreak — became the heart of the national playbook for responding to a pandemic is one of the untold stories of the coronavirus crisis.

Not everyone was convinced this weapon should be added to the government repertoire. “It required the key proponents — Dr. Mecher, a Department of Veterans Affairs physician, and Dr. Hatchett, an oncologist turned White House adviser — to overcome intense initial opposition.” But eventually it happened and the bureaucrats now had a canned response to pandemics that did not exist before. When the coronavirus began to devastate the health systems of northern Italy, the frightened bureaucracy had an instrument ready to use.

No one really knew what the effects of shutting down economic activity would be in early 2020 but neither did anyone know how potentially deadly the disease would be. What really broke the intellectual tie were hair-raising forecasts by epidemiological modelers predicting deaths in millions. Faced with this apocalyptic scenario and perhaps recalling the warnings of Climate Change advocates, the public was admonished to “trust the science.”

But the science, given the lack of data in the early days, was far from certain. When models in which so much trust had been reposed failed to pan out, especially those of the prestigious Imperial College, public confidence was shaken.

Imperial College has advised the government on its response to previous epidemics, including SARS, avian flu and swine flu. With ties to the World Health Organization and a team of 50 scientists, led by a prominent epidemiologist, Neil Ferguson, Imperial is treated as a sort of gold standard, its mathematical models feeding directly into government policies.

It was the crash heard round the world. After it was discovered how amateurish the software code was, trust turned to anger and the Daily Telegraph wrote in disgust that “Neil Ferguson’s model could be the most devastating software mistake of all time.” It was certainly an expensive one.

But even the most skillful software authorship could not have saved the Imperial model from the uncertainty surrounding the pathogen’s environmental behavior, which remain mysterious to this writing. Simon Jenkins writing in the Guardian captured his frustration at science’s ability to forecast a socio-medical phenomenon as complex as the weather in a kind of layman’s rant.

There is no correlation between fatalities and lockdown stringency. The most stringent lockdowns – as in China, Italy, Spain, New Zealand and Britain – have yielded both high and low deaths per million. Hi-tech has apparently “worked” in South Korea, but so has no-tech in Sweden. Sweden’s 319 deaths per million is far ahead of locked-down Norway’s 40 and Denmark’s 91, but it’s well behind locked-down UK’s 465 and Spain’s 569. …

The half-Swedish commentator Freddie Sayer has been closely monitoring this debate from the UK. He makes the point that with each passing week the rest of Europe moves steadily closer to imitating Sweden. It is doing so because modern economies – and their peoples – just cannot live with such crushing abnormality as they have seen these past two months.

Some of these crushing abnormalities are actually unintended consequences of government’s response to the virus, of fixes gone wrong. Governments, like New York’s, keen to avoid for the forecast (see ‘models’) inundation of hospitals by patients, responded by offloading infected seniors to nursing homes. Distracted by their efforts to lock down whole societies, they caused a massacre of the elderly in a fit of absentmindedness. As theNew York Timesnotes:

At least 28,100 residents and workers have died from the coronavirus at nursing homes and other long-term care facilities for older adults in the United States, according to a New York Times database. The virus so far has infected more than 153,000 at some 7,700 facilities. …

While just 11 percent of the country’s cases have occurred in long-term care facilities, deaths related to Covid-19 in these facilities account for more than a third of the country’s pandemic fatalities.

If nobody saw it coming maybe it was because government was fascinated with its shiny new superpowers. Only later did officials waken to this bit of friendly fire. “Gov. Andrew Cuomo has finally admitted — tacitly and partially, anyway — the mistake that was state health chief Howard Zucker’s order that nursing homes must admit coronavirus-positive patients.”

One of the reasons the lockdown debate is so psychologically difficult is it involves getting the public to choose between two risks, one with a tight sigma (economic collapse) versus another with a poorly defined sigma, the virus. Many people are hard pressed to select between a familiar, predictable system run-down and “high-profile, hard-to-predict, and rare event … beyond the realm of normal expectations,” It has divided the public into those who would rather endure a known, but certain economic doom than take their chances with a less predictable yet psychologically more menacing viral hazard — or vice versa.

Unfortunately we now know there is a third source of risk, arising from the chance that governments may initiate reactions to the pandemic that are catastrophic and unforeseen. Examples include the nursing home massacre and inflicting lasting damage on whole swaths of the economy. Such government reactions, far from having predictable linear effects, can be Black Swans in their own right.

If the lockdown set new standards for the intensity of government response to pandemics it also increased the risk of bureaucratically induced harm. Like the patients done in by a cytokine storm, countries and states may survive the virus only to succumb to their own countermeasures, felled by their own bureaucratic reaction.

Los Angeles County is, by a wide margin, the most populous county in the United States. At an estimated 10 million, its population is larger than all but seven states and over a hundred countries. In fact, LA County has nearly the same number of inhabitants as, dare I say it, Sweden. Yes, that neo-Nazi, baby-killing, fascist, herd immunity gathering, bastion of pure evil Sweden (sarcasm intended). Not only is LA County full of people, it is also full of money, having nearly the same GDP as Saudi Arabia.

A county with that population and wealth should have an army of world class scientists leading the battle in the fight against COVID-19. Let’s take a look at who is leading this world class team.

Our LA County Public Health Commissioner is Dr. Barbara Ferrer. You can find her bio here.

Impressive, right? Well, look a little closer. She must have graduated from a top-tier medical school, or so one would think…

Now is when I usually get the “OMG” response, even from the most liberal of liberals.

To be clear she is not even a medical doctor. She has a Doctorate in “Social Welfare.” So essentially, we have a high-powered social worker (albeit one of the most well-known in the country) leading the largest county in the United States in the fight of our lives against this biological threat.

Yes, this is the real-life version of “I’m not a doctor but I play one on TV.”

Instead of looking at science and data and adapting her public health response to attack what we now know are the strengths and weaknesses of this virus, she is essentially behaving like an elementary school principal (probably because she was one). Exerting her new-found unchallengeable and unelected power over an entire population that she views as children. She tells us what to do, how to do it, and even threatens to take away our few remaining freedoms, if we misbehave.

To be clear, I am not writing this to disparage Dr. Ferrer. She has had an illustrious career and has worked hard to achieve . The problem is that, in this fight against a novel coronavirus, we need a team of medical doctors and (apolitical) scientists guiding us, not a sociologist. In a place as populous and wealthy as LA County, we should expect to be led by some of the best in the world. We are clearly not.

She, like many of the public health directors across the country, is faced with a problem that a bureaucrat isn’t practiced or proficient enough to be fighting. Throw more common health issues at her, such as HIV prevention, homelessness, or opiate addiction, and I’m sure she could succeed. But, in the face of a brand new biological pandemic, she has no chance, and the numbers show it…………

LA County has the resources and financial wherewithal to focus on scientifically-targeted approaches, guided by data, and led by world-class medical doctors and scientists. Instead, we have allowed unelected bureaucrats to better their political lives by destroying all of ours.

The resolution affirms “the city’s commitment” to “fundamental” human rights. Churches and other nonprofits are included in the resolution, according to ABC30’s Vanessa Vasconcelos.

“A resolution of the city council of the city of Atwater affirming the city’s commitment to fundamental rights of life, liberty, and property, and declaring the city of Atwater a sanctuary city for all businesses,” the resolution read.

A statewide shelter-in-place order has been in effect since March 19, with gradual easements happening this month. While some counties were reportedly approved to move to “Phase 2” of the state’s reopening plan, which would allow some non-essential lower-risk business to reopen, Atwater’s Merced County was not included.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo has announced that the state’s stay-at-home order, which had been set to expire Friday, is being extended until June 13.

“Both travel-related cases and community contact transmission of COVID-19 have been documented in New York State and are expected to continue,” the governor’s executive order says in continuing the “New York State on PAUSE” policy, which was put in place in March.

“All enforcement mechanisms by state or local governments shall continue to be in full force and effect until June 13, 2020, unless later extended or amended by a future Executive Order,” he added in the order signed Thursday.

LOS ANGELES (KTTV) – Los Angeles County’s stay-at-home order will likely be extended until the end of July, unless county health officials see “dramatic change in this virus or in the tools” available to fight COVID-19, Dr. Barbara Ferrer, the county’s top public health official, told the Board of Supervisors Tuesday.

Ferrer’s comments came during a debate over how long a moratorium on evictions should remain in place. She did not directly address the extension of the current public health “Safer-at-Home” order, which is set to expire May 15.

The county began relaxing some of the stay-at-home restrictions on Friday, allowing certain retail stores to reopen for curbside pickup with social distancing and reopening a majority of the county’s hiking trails to residents who wore face-coverings and maintained six feet of space from others.

“Our hope is that by using the data, we’d be able to slowly lift restrictions over the next three months,” she said.

The White House is preparing an executive order which will require certain essential drugs be made in the U.S., two sources familiar with the matter told CNBC on Thursday.

One of the sources told CNBC’s Kayla Tausche the order could come out as soon as Friday. The applicable time frame for reviewing the order will be 90 days, the sources said.

The administration has a wide-ranging supply chain effort underway for products in a variety of sectors seen as national security issues, including drugs, medical supplies, semiconductors and defense equipment, the sources said.

About 72% of pharmaceutical ingredient manufacturers supplying the U.S. are located overseas, including 13% in China, according to an October congressional testimony by Janet Woodcock, director of the Food and Drug Administration’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research.

Although it is unclear whether it is the same executive order President Donald Trump’s trade advisor Peter Navarro is pushing for, Navarro has previously said he wanted an executive order that would reduce U.S. dependency on foreign-made drugs.

“This Big Pharma spin is simply a desperate attempt to stop President Donald J. Trump from moving the production of our essential medicines and medical equipment and supplies to the U.S,” Navarro told CNBC in an interview in which he spoke out against Big Pharma’s attempts to lobby against his executive order.

The executive order Navarro is planning will streamline regulatory approvals for “American-made” products and look to impose similar FDA restrictions on U.S. facilities as those abroad. It will also encourage the U.S. government, including the Department of Defense, Department of Health and Human Services and Department of Veterans Affairs, to only buy American-made medical products.

Gov. J.B. Pritzker for the first time Friday acknowledged his wife and daughter were in Florida before Illinois’ statewide stay-at-home order took effect in March and just recently returned to Chicago.

He said he was being “very private and very reserved” about his family “because there are threats to my safety and to their safety.

“You have seen that there are people that stand outside the Thompson Center and stand outside the Capitol in Springfield, holding, I mean, hateful signs that reference me personally and that suggest, if not say, but suggest the potential for violence,” he said.

On April 29, Pritzker testily responded to a question about a Patch.com report that his wife and family had gone to Florida amid the governor’s stay-at-home orders.

“My official duties have nothing to do with my family. So, I’m not going to answer that question. It’s inappropriate and I find it reprehensible,” he said of stories about his family.

That response prompted an outcry from Republican and right-leaning groups that the Democratic governor’s own wife wasn’t heeding the mandates of Pritzker’s stay-at-home order, though Pritzker never imposed an outright travel ban for residents.

“If his family can’t even heed the guidance of his own stay at home order, how does he expect Illinois voters to do the same?” said a May 4 email from the Republican National Committee with the subject line: “Governor Pritzker can’t take the heat.”

Pritzker said on Friday he hoped that an unnamed Republican super political action committee “that’s pushing stories like this about my family, would stop doing it because they are putting my children and family in danger.”

But he also acknowledged his family had only recently left Florida, where they had been staying since at least early March, before his stay-at-home order was issued. He owns an equestrian farm there.

Governor Brian P. Kemp Monday reported the lowest number of ventilators in use and Covid-19 positive patients hospitalized in Georgia since hospitals began submitting data to the Georgia Emergency Management and Homeland Security Agency (GEMA) on April 8.

As of Monday, May 11, there are 881 ventilators in use; 1,134 Covid-19 positive patients hospitalized statewide; and 1,987 critical care hospital beds in use across Georgia.

On Friday, May 1, there were 989 ventilators in use, 1,483 Covid-19 positive patients hospitalized statewide, and 2,119 critical care hospital beds in use across Georgia.

“This data shows that we are headed in the right direction in our battle with COVID-19. Every day, Georgians are recovering from the virus, freeing up hospital space as we continue to safely reopen our state and ramp up testing and contact tracing.”

Jimmy Fallon also has declared that isolating at home has brought him closer to his wife of 12 years, Nancy Juvonen.

“It’s been very bonding . . . We were like: ‘We actually like each other! We chose well!’”

Such is family life in a global pandemic. The reality is a remarkable repudiation of the gloom and doom pumped out by relationship experts, child shrinks and divorce lawyers.

As if the nuclear family were a malignant threat to health and sanity, they predicted the worst from close confinement: domestic violence, child abuse, “irreversible” damage to intimate relationships, and a divorce epidemic.

But anecdotal evidence is that children are happier, and a lot of families are getting along better than ever. Enforced isolation has brought a newfound appreciation for family life that is the silver lining to this wretched pandemic.

You can see clues in the sales figures; board games like ­Monopoly selling like hotcakes and a surge in communal sports equipment such as basketball hoops and footballs.

The craze for home baking has sparked a flour shortage. Without easy access to fast food, families are making their own bread and eating meals together, as fresh produce flies off the grocery shelves.

At a time of national crisis, Americans have had to slow down and turn inward, and those lucky enough to live with family are counting their blessings.